Archive of posts filed under the Crypto History category.

Today the first ever truly anonymous crypto currency ZEC went live. The full P2P client can be downloaded from here [Linux only for now]. The total number of ZEC coins will be only 21 million, like in bitcoin. Zerocash also reproduces few other unreasonable properties known from bitcoin: bizarre monetary policy with inelastic monetary supply and block halving every …

There is a considerable controversy around whether investing in a balanced basket of cryptocoins is a good idea. Two serious sources show that this sort of investment enjoys steady growth without a lot of downturns, cf. DLT10 Index and a recent detailed study which concentrates on a shorter period with excellent returns since Jan 2016 (cf. also …

So how did the NSA backdoored the Internet or did they??? New ground-breaking paper shows that DSA and DH mod P keys with 1024 bits are vulnerable to practical backdoors which can be exploited to break our secure communications. Few highlights: For such trapdoored primes the DL problem can be solved in 2 months by an academic cluster. The …

Home Work After a bombe demonstration by a WW2 veteran Ruth Bourne and BP bombe experts, students have been asked to further study at home how Enigma was broken, see our hand-out. More details can be found in our teaching materials “Enigma and Block Ciphers – 100 years of cryptanalysis with non-commutative combinations …

In a few minutes, cf. countdown, the amount of bitcoins attributed to each block mined will be divided by 2 in one single step. A rare event which happens once approximately every 4 years. This is an artificial shock which is tolerated by the bitcoin community in the name of misplaced ideology that whatever was decided …

We have heard about the CIA/NSA Uber Apple/Google/Facebook, food industry, rampant imperialism which emanates from a handful of countries… and how these forces corrupt politicians and business circles in many other countries. Well actually in many cases it is self-inflicted misery. In many cases it is politicians and business people who run these countries do not …

A major paper trying to explain why security experts have so frequently failed. Cormac Herley: The Unfalsifiability of Security Claims paper /slides. It starts with a great classic, Karl Popper philosophy of science which would be the basis to say “security” is some sort of pseudo-science. We read that “there is no empirical test that allows us …

For decades the dominant paradigm in crypto and security research would be: to claim that security vulnerabilities occur accidentally, ignoring major questions such as why there are so many of them and why the “bad scenarios” repeat so many times, concentrate security research on topics of secondary importance, or those which have no importance whatsoever and …

In the last 2 weeks it was possible to buy DAO tokens, a major new form of distributed business constructed to run on ETH blockchain. Until Friday 12 May 2016 some 50 M$ were invested. Then the price of these tokens has started raising [following the pre-determined rule] for the last 2 weeks of token …

Today the Economist publishes a picture of Craig Wright, who decided to confirm and embrace the claim that he is the mysterious creator of bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The picture and the paper portrays a sad man who is badly struggling “to convince the world that he is indeed who he claims to be”. He also …